Ipsos MORI is a market research company in the United Kingdom.[2] It was formed by a merger of Ipsos UK and MORI in October 2005.[3] Ipsos MORI conduct surveys for a wide range of major organisations as well as other market research agencies.

Ipsos MORI's Social Research Institute looks at public attitudes to key public services. Issues such as identity, social cohesion, physical capital and the impact of place on attitudes are all key themes of the Institute's work. The company also specialises in mass media, brand loyalty, marketing and advertising research. The organisation maintains a freely available archive of opinion polls and public attitude research from 1970 onwards on its UK website.

History

In 1946, Mark Abrams formed a market research company called Research Services Ltd. (RSL). RSL operated until 1991 when it was acquired by Ipsos, becoming Ipsos UK.

MORI (Market and Opinion Research International) was founded in 1969 by Robert Worcester, and throughout its existence was the largest independent research organisation in the United Kingdom.

Ipsos acquired MORI in 2005 for £88 million, and merged it with Ipsos UK to become Ipsos MORI.[6] The same year, Robert Worcester stepped down from chairmanship of MORI.[7]Ben Page is now Chief Executive.[8]

In 2006, Ipsos MORI were the first research agency in the world to gain ISO 20252, the new international quality standard for research.

Controversies

In May 2013, The Sunday Times reported that Ipsos MORI had negotiated an agreement with the EE mobile phone network to commercialise the data on that company's 23 million subscribers.[9] The article stated that Ipsos MORI was looking to sell this data to the Metropolitan Police and other parties. The data included "gender, age, postcode, websites visited, time of day text is sent [and] location of customer when call is made". When confronted by the newspaper, the Metropolitan Police indicated that they would not be taking the discussions any further. Ipsos MORI defended their actions, stressing that the company only received anonymised data, without any personally identifiable data on an individual customer, and underlining that reports are only ever made on aggregated groups of more than 50 customers.[10][11][12]